I was recently invited
to give a guest lecture
on narrative
lighting for the Bay Area
Professional Videographer’s
Association in
San Jose, Calif. During
the discussion, a member
brought up the
question of how to create
believable looking sunlight.

We all know that the color temperature
of daylight is 5,600 K (on average),
but that 5,600 K is actually derived from a
combination of direct sunlight and ambient
skylight. It’s the two distinct sources
that create the daylight we see every day;
and that’s the key to creating believable
artificial sunlight: two sources.

Fig. 1: The late afternoon sunlight coming through closed curtains in the
author’s living room.

When I was working on my book, “A
Shot in the Dark,” I sat down with my good
friend, Dr. Jeffrey Crane, an astronomer,
and talked to him about the real color of
the sun. As with most things, it was a much
more complex discussion than one might
imagine. The color that we see of the sun
itself varies greatly depending on your
location on earth, the atmospheric conditions,
weather, and the time of day.

IT VARIES
Those of us who shoot video out in the
real world on a constant basis know that
sunlight is rarely ever 5,600 K. It varies
during the course of the day and it varies
based on cloud coverage and atmospheric
pollution. I’ve seen desert sandstorms in
the distance that drop the color temperature
of the sun so
drastically that so
we couldn’t keep
shooting.

The key to understanding
how
to create believable
daylight is in
understanding the
two different color
sources: the direct
light from the sun
itself and the ambient
skylight.

I was pondering
a way to illustrate
this in nature
when I noticed
the late afternoon
sunlight coming
through closed
curtains in my
living room. One
portion of the curtain
was a bright
warm glow, the
other was a very
cool and dimmer
glow. Right there
I had the exact illustration of the two colors
of sunlight, (Fig. 1).

Generally I’ll use two sources when
trying to create daylight—whether exterior
or interior. The first is ambient skylight.
This is, generally, a cooler color temperature
than my key “sun.” During the demonstration
in San Jose for the Bay Area Professional
Videographers, I used a 650 Watt
Arri Fresnel with 1/4 CTB bounced into a
white textured ceiling as my ambient skylight
and an Arri 300 Watt Fresnel, clean, as
my direct sunlight. I bounced the 300 Watt
unit into a counter in the kitchen to give a
little uplight glow on Amber Myer, the talent
modeling for the demonstration. With
just the edge of the 300 Watt fixture’s field
angle hitting Amber below her shoulder, it
put a hot source on her torso. The combination
of the two sources—cool, soft
overhead bounce, and more direct clean
tungsten bounce—created an absolutely
believable daylight look (Fig. 2).

To accentuate this look, I aimed the 650
Watt bounce to be just above where the
300 Watt Fresnel was. This way the bounce
had some general directionality from the
same direction as the hot spot. It made it
feel like both sources were coming from
the same large window off-camera. There’s
also a 150 Watt Fresnel from off-camera
pointing right at the microwave oven behind
Amber. Without this, that was a dark
area in the frame that belied the daylight
look.

Fig.3: A shot of actress Lisa Jay taken long
after the sun has set

I used this same technique in a small
project called “Tranquility, Inc.” for director
Jamie Neese. Fig. 3 shows a shot of actress
Lisa Jay taken long after the sun had
set.

Recreating late-afternoon sunlight, I
used a 650 Watt Fresnel bounced low into
the white door to her right to create the
bright sunlight and a 300 Watt Fresnel (the
same light kit I used in San Jose) bounced
into the ceiling above (and in front of)
Lisa. Here, because the hot “sun” is behind
her, I bounced the cooler fill in
front of her to give the feeling of sun
coming through the window and bouncing
off the wall in front of her for the
soft fill.

It’s the combination of these two
sources—a soft bounce, generally cooler
in color temperature, to mimic ambient
daylight, and a more direct, generally
warmer, source to mimic direct
sunlight—that serve to create a very believable
natural daylight look.

Jay Holben is the technical editor of
Digital Video and a contributor to Government
Video. He’s also the author of
the book “A Shot in the Dark: A Creative
DIY Guide to Digital Video Lighting on
(Almost) No Budget.” He can be contacted
via TV Technology.